The story of the phone being installed at Mary Baker Eddy's tomb in Mt. Auburn cemetery isn't nearly as supernatural as it sounds.

The church people figured that she was pretty famous, and the grave was pretty ornate, and they didn't want people chipping pieces off of it as souvenirs. So they hired a watchman to keep an eye on it for a year or so until the interest died down. The watchman, said, reasonably enough, "That's pretty damn creepy, spending my nights in a graveyard all by myself, " so they gave him a phone (portable two-way radios were pretty large, fussy, and esoteric pieces of gear at the time.)

The phone was for the living, not for the deceased. But when the Bell system techs showed up to installed it, the fact that "they were installing a phone at Mary Baker Eddy's grave" got legs of its own.

It probably was an opossum. Unless a possum escaped form the zoo, as possums are native to Australia and derive their name from the North American animal. Opossum comes from an algonquin word meaning "white beast". I wonder how many Australians know that the Algonquin language has made its way into their vernacular.